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Quirky is an open source, fast, lightweight and featureful operating system based on the well known Puppy Linux distribution and designed from the ground up to be deployed on a wider range of computers and hardware platforms than the original Puppy Linux OS. It is created using the T2 build system.

Distributed as ISO, USFS and USB images

This custom Puppy Linux operating system is available for download as a Live CD ISO image, as well as XZ compressed USFS and USB images that must be extracted and deployed to USB flash drives of 8GB or higher capacity. It boots on both 32-bit and 64-bit computer platforms.

Very minimal boot menu à la Puppy Linux

The distribution uses the same minimalistic boot menu that is also found on the main Puppy Linux operating system, as well as several other Pupplets. Basically, it provides users with a boot prompt where they can hit Enter to start the live environment. However, you can press the F2 key on your keyboard to access a help menu.

Classic, traditional and fast desktop environment

The main attraction of any Puppy Linux operating system is the classic and traditional desktop environment, which is powered by JWM (Joe's Window Manager), a minimal and very fast window manager that looks cartoonish, yet very attractive. It uses a single panel layout from where the user can easily access the main menu, launch applications and interact with running programs.

Bottom line

Summing up, Quirky is one of those easy-to-use, lightweight and feature-rich operating systems that have been designed from the ground up to be deployed on low-end machines or computers with old and semi-old hardware components.

I created Puppy Linux back in 2003, but there was never a toolchain for compiling Puppy completely from source. Instead, Puppy is built from binary packages of another distro, plus PET packages compiled natively.

We did use the T2 system right back at Puppy v2, T2 being a system to compile from source, however it only compiled a big chunk of the packages, not all. We still used manual compiling to create many PET packages.

Until now. Starting in December 2014, I tackled the formidable task of compiling everything in T2, and I had to introduce 105 new packages into T2. It took a couple of months, but I eventually was able to compile every package required for Quirky (my fork of Puppy).

T2 is able to compile for various CPU targets, and the proof of concept was when I compiled for a x86_64 CPU (all previous builds had been for i686). I was able to build a x86_64-based Quirky, and it works the same as the i686 build (after some tweaks).